Always Will

by Jacobson, Melanie

  “Yeah. You didn’t tell me how your date went. Seemed like you hit it off. Was the cheesecake good?”

  He grunted and took the plates from me to set on his coffee table. I went to the kitchen and dug up clean silverware and two blue drinks before I joined him.

  “I don’t know how the cheesecake was. We didn’t make it that far. When you’re running an efficiency model on your dating life, it’s pretty easy to cut your losses.”

  I winced. “Seems kind of cold.”

  “It’s better than spending a couple of extra hours and wasting their time, isn’t it? I mean, I could hang around to be polite, but in the end, I’m not doing my date any favors if I’m not feeling it.” He frowned. “Right?”

  Right? The single-word question represented a tiny seismic shift between us. He was asking my opinion. About dating protocol. “Right,” I agreed. I wasn’t about to tell him to spend any more time with these women. Right? Right? Right? I rolled around his question in my head, enjoying the feel of him asking me for advice. Kind of. It was a small but distinct step in the right direction. Maybe this was what happened when I kept showing up at his house in my big-girl clothes instead of sweats and a Rangers T-shirt to hang out.

  I smoothed down the blush-pink silk of my tailored work blouse, a perfect balance of feminine and professional.

  Will noticed. “Where’s your Rangers shirt? Game three starts in twenty minutes.”

  I stifled a sigh. He’d noticed my pretty work shirt for the wrong reasons, but he’d noticed. “I didn’t feel like changing. So Raina’s out. Who’s up next?”

  “I don’t know. I have to rethink the approach. Batting zero means you change the lineup.”

  My chicken stuck in my throat, and I coughed to clear it. “We have a good strategy in place. You have to give it time, find your rhythm.”

  He shook his head. “I’ve got a large enough sampling size to know it’s time to do this differently.”

  Stay calm, I ordered myself. “What are you thinking? Switching websites?”

  “No. Switching up my profile. The one we put up doesn’t feel all the way like me. I think I need to own up to being a science-loving baseball junkie who does extreme sports in my free time. None of that’s in there now. I think putting it out there will draw more girls who think I’m fun instead of super serious. And I’m changing that profile picture. That broody shot is someone whose butt I would kick just because.”

  Crud. His inbox would be bursting with messages if he did that. And it would be women who liked the masculinity of his hobbies and respected his giant rocket-scientist brain. And Will being Will would pick the most gorgeous, petite, darling ones. And he would eventually choose one and marry it. Her. He would marry her. And he would be bored inside of three years. What kind of friend would let him walk into that?

  I had to save him. For his sake, obviously.

  Man. No one could lie to me as well as I could.

  But I waded in anyway. “You’re probably right that it’s time to switch up your approach, but your way is going to get you a bunch of women like the ones you always date. So don’t do it your way.”

  “You’ve got a better idea?”

  “Always,” I said.

  He grinned and reached over to tousle my hair, but I leaned back and caught his wrist, setting his hand down on the sofa between us. “I’m having a good hair day. Let’s keep it going.”

  He glanced at my hair and shrugged. “Okay.”

  I ran the mental analytics on new approaches to Will’s online dating. “I think,” I said slowly as a new idea bubbled up, “you do need to change your profile, but you need to become a woman.”

  He choked on his Gatorade. “What?”

  “I mean it. You need to enter an experimental phase so you can figure out how to tweak your own profile for maximum results. I read that men contact women on dating sites at a far greater rate than women contact men.” I hadn’t read that, but it sounded like something that could be true. It was true for me, so that was enough proof for the case I was laying out. “If you become the initiator, you’re going to have to do even more to set yourself apart from the other Dallas guys on HeyThere.”

  “And this involves a sex-change operation?”

  “Yes. Brilliant, right?”

  He set his plate down, and I knew what was coming next. Before he could haul me his way for a punitive noogie, I held up a “stop” hand and let his intentions slam right into it. “If you touch this very expensive shirt with your grubby boy fingers, you’re dead to me.” Also, I’m not your little sister or your wrestling monkey.

  He froze and held his hands up in surrender. “It’s pretty.” His voice was grudging, but butterflies flapped up to my chest from my stomach, brainless little insects that they were. He’d noticed that my shirt was pretty. That was several steps past noticing I wasn’t wearing a Rangers shirt. “What’s your real idea?”

  “I think you need to invent a profile for the ideal woman you want. Just build her. You can make her whatever you want, but it has to legit be the kind of woman you should marry, not the kind you always date. And then you post it and see what kind of guys are contacting her. Then study their profiles to see how to adjust yours to stand out.”

  “It seems kind of messed up to set a honey trap for unsuspecting dudes to come check out a profile for a girl who doesn’t exist. It’s not cool to waste people’s time like that. And it’s kind of manipulative.”

  A sharp pang twinged in my chest at the word. That was exactly what I was doing—going as far out of my way as I could to waste Will’s time. I should drop the whole thing and help him do a straightforward profile of the Will I knew, but when I opened my mouth, I pushed ahead with my plan. “It’s not manipulation. You’re not going to respond to any of these guys. You’re not going to lead them into some kind of false relationship. You’re collecting data that will ultimately allow you to figure out how to present the best version of yourself so that you can really, truly find the person meant for you. It’s science, tweaking the variables, not a head game.”

  I recognized the lines appearing around his eyes, and my stomach sank. Those were his stubborn lines, the ones that showed up when he was about to dig in. “Think about it, Will. How is this any different from observing people in a bar for a few nights, analyzing the way they interact, and then hitting the bar yourself with your best face forward? Most people show up determined to be only the awesomest parts of themselves. Is that manipulation? No. Dating is a social contract. We expect our dates to show us one aspect of themselves initially and then to reveal their whole identity over time. Nobody feels manipulated by that.

  “The only difference here is that you’re approaching it more thoughtfully, gathering more information, sitting in the bar, watching before you present the aspect of you that you think gives girls the best idea about who you are.”

  Will sat back, the stubborn lines smoothing out, and gave me a slight smile. “Tell me again why you didn’t go to law school?”

  “I hate bad guys, and contracts bore me. What’s left to do in law? I’ve got a brain for code, and I know how to wrangle squirrelly programmers. Give me five years and I’ll be the youngest director at my company by a decade. I’m doing exactly what I’m built for. Being a good debater is a bonus skill set I trot out for times like now, when I need to convince you to do the thing that’s going to help you the most in the end.”

  “Are you helping me because you think if you get me married off I’ll be out of your hair? Because you should give that idea up right now. I’m in your life permanently.” He laced his fingers behind his head and leaned back, shooting me a smug smile.

  My insides melted while I let myself imagine for a fleeting moment that he meant those words the way I wanted him to mean them.

  “Big Brother is always watching,” he said. And the melting became an uncomfortable acid wash in my abdomen.

  “Hand me your laptop, and we’ll start this new profile,” I said. “
Let’s give it a few days to see if you’re collecting useful data. If it’s not giving you any insights into your own dating strategy, we delete the profile. This isn’t a big deal, but it could be a good tool.”

  He considered it for another long minute before he pushed himself up from the sofa and retrieved his laptop from his bedroom, handing it over without further argument.

  “Tell me what you want,” I said. “Think hard about the girls you date and why those relationships never last for you, and then pick the opposite of all those qualities. Let’s build your true perfect match. And if you say Adrienne Lima, I’m not helping you anymore. Take it seriously.”

  “But I’m serious as a heart attack when I say I would absolutely date a Victoria’s Secret model.”

  I shut the laptop.

  “Kidding, kidding.”

  I reopened it. “I’ll start you off. You need a girl who’s as book smart as she is street smart. You’ll get bored if she can’t keep up with your technical conversations.”

  “True,” he said. “I need someone who is driven. She needs a career, something she loves doing so she gets it when I’m deep into something for work. I need her to not do Pilates.”

  I paused in my typing, and he glanced over at me. “Most of the girls I date are really into Pilates for whatever reason. So if we’re into opposites, I should be looking for someone who isn’t gym sculpted. But fit is not negotiable. She has to be able to keep up with my sports stuff.”

  “So someone who runs for the love of it, not someone who goes to the gym for the look of it.” Like me, dummy. Totally fit because it felt better than being undisciplined, with zero interest in whatever mixed dance-martial arts-cardio-ballet craze was sweeping like a virus through Dallas gyms at any given moment.

  “Basically, yeah. I guess she needs to have a passion outside of work too. My mom told me once that you have to have big things in common because it bonds you but that you need just as many big things not in common because it helps you remember who you are outside of a marriage twenty years in. She says that’s why she and my dad never run out of things to talk about. They have enough separate activities that there’s always something for them to be learning about each other. That’s kind of cool.”

  “So does it matter what this driving passion is?” I asked. “Because Letterbox girl was pretty passionate about mailboxes.”

  “Yeah. That date was your fault, so don’t sound so superior. And a collection of mailbox pictures isn’t okay. I’m thinking more like someone who’s into pottery or photography.”

  “So something creative,” I said like I was pondering it. “Like making beautiful food.” Like me. I did that. Food was my canvas.

  “Exactly.”

  I clicked away. “What else?”

  “Thinking in opposites, I guess she’d be someone with strong opinions about more than where we should get dinner or which movie to see. I mean, that’s good too, actually. I like someone who knows what she wants. But I like someone who can argue about foreign policy or patent reform or . . .” He trailed off, trying to think of something else.

  “Why Doctor Who is the most overrated cultural phenomenon of our time?”

  “It’s not,” he said, his forehead slamming into predictable furrows. “It’s a show that makes important observations about human nature.”

  “It’s mildly entertaining serial television that doesn’t work hard enough to justify the way it plays with the space-time continuum while it pretends to be superior genre entertainment to better shows like Fringe, which is tragically underrated.”

  “Your argument is invalid. Fringe fails to resonate at the level where you have fandoms built around it, like Doctor Who does. And it fails for the reason that it’s not as good. Its themes aren’t universal enough. It depends too much on the creep factor.”

  He was working himself up, and I smiled at him. “So someone who can have arguments like that. That’s what you’re saying you need.” Someone like me.

  “Nice. I fell for that. But, yes. Someone like that.”

  “Keep going. We need a little more to round this fake girl out. What music does she need to listen to?”

  “Anything, as long as she’s cool with variety. Shelley only listened to top forty. We were in my car once when a Beatles song came on, and she was like, ‘This is pretty good. Is it new?’ And I think that’s when I knew we weren’t going to work.”

  “Yeah, because stealing laundry isn’t that big a deal.”

  “Stop being bitter.”

  “She has my favorite bra. I’ll be bitter as long as I want to.”

  He rolled his eyes. “Buy a new one. I’ll buy you a new one.” My eyes flew up, and he reddened a tiny bit. “Never mind. You buy your own bras. I just meant you’re being kind of dramatic.”

  “Right. Anyway. No top forty,” I prompted him, navigating us back toward solid ground. For a second there, we’d been adrift in a place I didn’t recognize. “Fake Girl now listens to a variety of music that suggests some hipster tendencies.”

  “But she can’t be a hipster. I dated a couple of those. They’re exhausting. You can’t go eat somewhere where it’s convenient. You have to go to these nests of slightly musty plaid-wearers built inside ironic buildings like former plumbing stores in industrial parks.”

  “I had no idea. No hipsters. I’ll make her like me.” Why couldn’t he see that he’d been describing me to a T with his whole list? That I was the perfect antidote to these women who’d bore him within weeks, one after the next?

  “What do you mean, make her like you?”

  I shrugged. “I’m not into trends or movements. I like what I like, and I do it. Won’t that be a good way to explain what you’re looking for?”

  “Yeah, actually.”

  “Okay. Turn the game on. I’ll pull this profile together and have your perfect woman ready for you in a few minutes.”

  “Great,” he said in a voice that said the opposite. “Can’t wait until I find out what I’ve been looking for all along.”

  That made two of us.

  I completed the profile before the announcers had even finished breaking down the lineups. “Got it. We need a picture.”

  “That’s a problem. I’m not stealing a picture of some real girl off the Internet for this.”

  “We can use a picture of me.”

  “Good idea. Put up that one you made me take of you.”

  “Uh, no? Chances are any guys who are looking for this girl would also have turned me up in their search.” Fake Girl was Real Me. “It’s going to look weird if two different profiles have the same photo. We’ll take another one of me, but I’ll do my makeup different. Should I go for a drama queen look, red lipstick, all that? Or more of a Miss January look?”

  “No pinup looks. And why Miss January? If I were a pinup girl, I’d be a good month, like June.”

  “If you were a pinup girl, you’d have to do way more waxing. And also, the summer girls are always blond. Brunettes get the winter months.”

  His eyebrow rose. “Spend a lot of time looking at calendars?”

  “I guess the question here is, do you? Is that the look we’re going for? Shiny, pouty lips? Bedroom eyes?”

  He looked appalled. “You don’t need a look. Just do a picture of your regular self. That’s how you look best anyway.”

  I went a little melty again. “What’s my regular self, Will? I play with my look all the time depending on what I’m doing.”

  “I know, but you look best when . . . you know,” he said, giving up on words to wave his arm in the direction of my head.

  “Shocking as this is, this”—I flapped my arm in imitation of him—“does not help me. Be specific.”

  “I don’t know,” he said, mild frustration coloring his words. “Just look like you.”

  “You got it.” I slid his laptop off my lap and stood.

  “Where are you going? It’s almost time for Luke Bryan to throw out the first pitch.”

&n
bsp; I sat right back down. “I’ll hang around for Luke Bryan.”

  Will’s brow furrowed. “I thought you didn’t like country music.”

  “I don’t have to like it to appreciate Luke Bryan. I don’t know if I want him to wear jeans or borrow some of those tight baseball pants to do this.”

  He scowled. “You were about to go do something, possibly something weird with your face?”

  “Yes, Will. Making myself look like me is doing something weird with my face.”

  “Don’t get mad at me. This whole conversation is weird. You are the one who took it to some meta level where looking like you somehow involves you leaving and coming back transformed. Why am I in trouble? I just want to watch baseball.”

  “I’ll be back in a few minutes. If Luke Bryan is pitching in jeans, you’ll be rewinding so I can watch that. A few times.”

  He grumbled, and I walked out, heading to my apartment like I had some plan. I had zero plan, but I did have a chance to make him really look at me again. He was going to be curious to see what I came up with. He’d study me, think through how my makeover would match up with the ideal girl he thought he’d invented, who was, in a convoluted plot twist, me. It was like being in a Christopher Nolan movie. If he did romantic comedies.

  I had to somehow make the ideal woman Will had described align with me in his mind in a way he’d never considered before.

  It was impossible.

  I needed Sophie.

  Chapter 11

  “Subtle eye, deep berry lipstick, no gloss, which gives you a sophisticated sexy lip. It’ll call attention to your mouth without him even realizing it, where a gloss will make him realize he’s noticing your mouth, and that will kick his brain into analytical gear. You don’t want him to think about this all clinical style. You want him to just experience you for as many seconds as you can squeeze together before he starts thinking.”

  She knew exactly what to do, and it was pulling me back from the brink of failure, the feeling that I was being handed a golden opportunity that I was going to blow.